


Songs for the Dead

by Drag0nst0rm



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 11:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20045647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/pseuds/Drag0nst0rm
Summary: Maglor writes more elegies for his father than is strictly necessary or perhaps even sane.





	Songs for the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own the Silmarillion.

Maglor writes more elegies for his father than is entirely sensible or perhaps even sane.

The first isn’t really a proper one at all. It’s just noise, almost a wail, all his anguish pouring out as his father goes up in smoke.

A few hours later, he thinks, in a shocked sort of way, that he’ll have to write a proper one. Something to sing for their people. He actually manages to start on one, which he later counts as a sort of proof that he could write music in his sleep because at the time he had about that much brain function.

He isn’t even halfway through with it when they lose Maedhros, and he crumples it up and throws the whole thing on the fire. He writes instead a song for Maedhros which without him quite intending it turns into the furious scratching of you idiot, you _idiot_, you absolute idiot, how could you do this and leave us alone, YOU IDIOT - set to music that runs across his ears like a screech. 

Caranthir finds that one and shouts at him a lot. He shouts back, and the thing ends up getting ripped to shreds.

He writes another one later. One for both Maedhros and his father, that is powerful and moving and entirely political. 

Everyone loves it but Curufin, who has always read that sort of thing far too well.

When Maedhros returns to them, not dead after all, Maglor writes a song for that, of course. Maedhros asks him, later, if Maglor had written a song for his death.

He makes the mistake of asking the night after yielding the crown to their uncle, and Maglor, blank faced, sings him the version that repeatedly calls him an idiot.

Maedhros laughs for the first time since Angband, even if it is a bit hysterical.

That should probably be the end of it, but it isn’t. Not even close.

Maedhros’s return and the rise of the sun bring a new ache to his father’s death. Maedhros has returned and the whole world seems to have been made new, but his father is still gone.

He doesn’t mean to share the song with anyone, but Celegorm hears him. He doesn’t say anything about it, just sinks to his knees beside his brother with the very same pain in his eyes.

When Thingol bans Quenya and Fingolfin decrees that they’d better go along with it at least in public, Maglor spends months translating his old songs.

HIs father wouldn’t have stood for it, he thinks. His father, who had loved language, who had fought an entire linguistic shift for the sake of his mother’s name, had been happy to learn the new language, but he never would have surrendered to it.

His old laments sound odd in Sindarin, so he writes a new one in this new tongue.

Then he secretly writes another in Quenya, wrapped in the conceit that the language itself mourns the man who had loved it so fiercely.

It becomes a habit to write laments for his father whenever something happens. They become conversations: letters to his father that are never answered, save in his mind’s twisting dreams.

They approach something that is almost peace while he guards the Gap.

Then the Long Peace goes up in flames, and his songs become desperate beacons for his people as they frantically retreat.

When his lungs become too choked with smoke with that and his mind hazes, his memory drifts to his father’s fire, and the song becomes a quietly choked plea.

He sings lots of laments after the Nirnaeth. None of them directly address his father, but he writes them all with his father’s Tengwar, and whenever he closes his eyes, he still sees flames.

After Doriath, he writes another, fast and choppy and filled with despairing rage.

He rips it apart himself and throws it into the fire.

It turns to ash quickly.

Alqualonde. Doriath.

He already knows it will happen again, that it must happen again, and he wants desperately to be able to lay it all at his father’s feet, when Feanor had raised his sword in the air and shouted his Oath and expected his sons to follow.

It would be easier.

He dreams of his father that night, his father weeping silently as Maglor screams his ashen accusations into the wind, and when he wakes up, Maglor is weeping too.

He writes another song that reads more like a confession and a plea, all rolled into one.

I wish you were here.

If you were here, you would know what to do.

He writes other songs after Doriath.

Songs for Celegorm. Songs for Curufin. Songs for Caranthir. Songs for all their fallen people.

He writes a song for the sake of fallen Doriath too.

He writes songs for Amrod and Amras after the Havens.

He writes songs for Elwing and Earendil too, but he is careful not to make them laments.

Elrond writes one of those later when Elros convinces him they’re dead. Maglor hopes - fruitlessly, he knows - that it’s the only one Elrond ever has need to write.

He doesn’t write songs for his father now, but he thinks of him often as he struggles to -

Not to raise the twins, surely that’s the wrong term, but he can’t think of any term that isn’t worse.

He dreams of Tirion and of his father singing him to sleep after Maglor had nightmares of monsters hiding in the dark.

Elrond and Elros also dream of monsters, though admittedly for rather different reasons.

He thinks of writing a song when they at last have to send them away, but that thought is too close to singing their laments, and Maglor shies away from the slightest hint of that.

He doesn’t write a song for Maedhros. Not for a long, long time.

He sings to his father instead, a wordless wail for his lost parents, his lost brothers, his lost home.

For the Music he had clung to for one brief shining moment before he’d flung its shining light into the sea.

He thinks he will still be singing to his father when he is nothing but a voice on the wind.

Their deeds would be a matter of song till the end of days, his father had said, and this promise, at least, he can keep.

(That’s all very well, Elrond says when he finds him, but Maglor can do that just as well from Rivendell, and while Maglor is free to disagree with that, Elrond is free to follow him around singing a song that his children claim never ends until Maglor changes his mind.

It does not take Maglor long to change his mind.)


End file.
